This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies. For full details visit https://www.iainabernethy.co.uk/legal-information

This website uses cookies to help us give you the best experience when you visit our website. By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies. For full details visit https://www.iainabernethy.co.uk/legal-information

You are here

Working out Kata applications?

I write with the greatest of respect to my Sensei; however; when it comes to Kata bunkai i am still frustrated when trying to work out applications. My Sensei has always said that if you perform a kata enough, applications will just fall out of them. I still cannot work out how this is achieved as the analogy is that if you say words of foreign language enough you'll soon be fluent. I would welcome any opinions on how you get to a point by just performing a kata, applications will fall out??

To be perfectly blunt, that is a terrible approach, and--in my opinion--a huge part of why so many karateka DON'T know how to use their kata. You don't magically come to a realization of how the techniques work just from working the solo kata, and you cannot develop fighting skills, and an understanding of them, purely by practicing a solo kata. You have to at least be given solid examples of applications, and drill them in a variety of methods so that you develop a good working knowledge of them. Once you have some examples and experience, figuring out alternative applications for the movements is definitely something you can do--you visualize it, then try it on a person, then drill and pressure test it.

Many thanks for your opinion Wastelander. I have been following Iain's applications and using them to work out the language of Kata. They have opened up Kata for me and they make sense. I have even come up with a few new ones myself! It's a magical feeling when all of a sudden you come up with something that seems to work.

My Sensei has always said that if you perform a kata enough, applications will just fall out of them …

… I would welcome any opinions on how you get to a point by just performing a kata, applications will fall out??

I’m just going to end up echoing Noah here, but for what it’s worth …

Wastelander wrote:

To be perfectly blunt, that is a terrible approach …

I agree. Kata needs to be part of a holistic process for its value to be fully realised. A “Field of Dreams” approach to the kata (“if you practise it, the applications will come”) totally ignores the wider process. As Noah said …

Wastelander wrote:

You don't magically come to a realization of how the techniques work just from working the solo kata, and you cannot develop fighting skills, and an understanding of them, purely by practicing a solo kata. You have to at least be given solid examples of applications, and drill them in a variety of methods so that you develop a good working knowledge of them.

The applications need to understood, drilled with a partner, drilled on pads, tested in various live drills, the underlying principles need to be integrated and made habitual, etc. Solo kata alone won’t achieve that. It’s like buying a book, never reading it, and yet somehow expecting the knowledge to migrate to your brain. We need to read the book, understand it, and then make use of the information for the book to “work” and fulfil its purpose.

steve126 wrote:

I have been following Iain's applications and using them to work out the language of Kata. They have opened up Kata for me and they make sense.

I’m pleased my stuff has proved useful. That’s great to hear! There’s so much good information out there these days. Loads of good people sharing good information. The kata process has been thoroughly dissected. No one needs to just keep practising in the hope of martial revelation by an unidentified process. The kata are there to be studied and it’s great that you are enjoying the process.

I find new applications "by reverse". For example, I was practising an escape from a double handed choke from the front and the movement reminded me of moves 45 - 46 of jion (forearm falling strike -> stomp -> punch to the side (adapted to an elbow strike). A little bit of work had this as a reasonable bunkai application. I've had people try and perform their syllabus bunkai from an unusual position (kneeling on the ground for example) and this forced some variations that fitted with the flow of the kata. Or I stop people mid grappling, ask them what they'd do next and often a series of moves presents itself that fits with a kata.

As someone who has practised solo kata for nearly 30 years, I can say that the applications never magically came to me through solo practise of the kata alone. Also the environment I grew up learning karate in treated my style (Shotokan) very much as a striking art. As a result you would tend to only see (or visualise) everything as applications using punches, kicks, and blocks... never locks, throws, chokes, strangulations, etc.

These days, I am much more inquisitive of kata applications, and like many on these forums, Iain has been a great source of knowledge and inspiration.

The Theory of Kaisai (Kaisai no Genri) is an incredibly helpful list of principles for decoding kata, especially when you think of responses that are in line with the most common attacks (HAPV theory, HAOV).

In addition to Kaisai no Genri, anytime I hear a good principle or concept, I add it to a list I keep handy.

Here are a few other concepts/principles/rules of thumb relating to kata that I've picked up along the way. I apologize, but I do not have sources for any of them (although I'm sure Iain has said many of these things, if that counts):

1. "As mentioned in Kaisai no Genri, kata uses the Coepernican Model of Movement in order to tell you at what angle you should be relative to your opponent. Turning 90 degrees to the left implies that you have positioned yourself so that you are 90 degrees to your opponent's left, facing him."

2. "Kata predicts movement based on knowledge of pain responses and body mechanics. Chudan punches in kata are most likely punches to the head of someone who has been bent over either by a preceding strike or a breaking of posture. E.g. a kick to the groin, will naturally cause the opponent to shoot the hips back, bend forward, and lower the head."

3. "Gross motor actions are the primary means of engagement, possibly followed up with fine motor actions. Fine motor action is never the primary method of engagement as you need to first make and maintain physical contact with your opponent (i.e. datum setting) before any fine motor actions would be successful. (e.g. two finger poke to the eyes in Chinte is difficult to do unless you first make and maintain physical contact with teisho to the chin)."

4. "Each segment should put the practitioner in a position to end the fight."

Basically, find a willing partner and try things at close range. Try working the movements starting with your opponent grabbing you in various ways (wrist, hair, around the waist, around the leg, etc). Try using the movement to defend against a right hook punch (most common attack for males). Introduce angles to see if it improves the application. Use both hands. Your partner must also respond appropriately to your actions, either from mild pain, or by simply being a really good actor. It won't help you much if your partner is just standing upright, or is not responding in turn to your application (one would hope that should you grab your opponent's genitals, they would try to remove your hand!). Once you find a good application, try to find similar ideas in other kata.

Excellent points made so far ... I will just add that one method I have for finding bunkai is to look at old material. The closer you get to the roots of karate, the more likely you are to be dealing with someone for whom the kata were the textbook. So when you find an old picture of someone demonstrating an application, ask yourself what kata that looks like. Likewise, get the Bubishi and go through the self-defense diagrams and ask yourself where those techniques show up in forms.

I like to break it down to one or two moves at a time, and try to imagine every possible way someone might be attacking, and what I might be doing to negate their attack. If I imagine something possibly working, I'll ask a willing comrade to attack me slowly in the way I imagined, and slowly counter the way I imagined. Sometimes it turns out I was way off. My imagined defence or counter simply can't work with the positions I imagined. Sometimes however, something works beautifully. Then we can speed it up and play with it.

The other thing I like to do is study how others move. Especially when sparring. Especially when they're sparring me. You have to be a bit careful with this. It's very cheeky and definitely pushing your luck, but sometimes if you can prod in all the right ways and see what your opponent does, every now and then you'll spot something that looks like it came straight out of a form.

The foreign language analogy you gave in your original post does make sense. You do not get fluent by just phonetically repeating some words. If you want to learn to communicate in a language there are basically two ways to achieve that. For both you need other people who already speak the language.

One way is to surround yourself with native speakers, observe them, try to pick up sounds, words or phrases, and repeat them back to them and with time figure out which reactions you can provoke by uttering certain sounds, words or phrases. - That's how babys learn, in a nutshell.

The other way is to learn a language from a teacher who systematically introduces you to important phrases and the structure of the language with examples, syntax rules, pronounciation and a phrase book or even a text book. And you need people to practice and converse with.

The same is true for learning karate (or any other fighting art). And kata is like a phrase book that provides you with some useful phrases in a meaningful order, but only in the foreign language. There are no translations or explanations in the book itself.

You need additional information and instruction on how to make use of the foreign phrases in the book. Their meaning or usefulness will not reveal itself just by staring at the characters or reading them out loud when you are alone.

You also might want to check out Bill Burgar's great book "Five Years, One Kata". It includes a nice checklist that helps to evaluate the plausibility of an application within the context an entire kata.

We need to be clear that not all the guidelines apply to all the moves in all the katas. There was no normative institution that standardised rules for how to encode techniques and principles into solo forms and how to decode them back into applications. Still, lists of possible "codecs" (as in coding-decoding method) can be helpful in finding plausible applications.